A Reporter at Odds

Trading the notebook for a guidebook.

I am a reluctant tourist. Most reporters are. We’ve been spoiled by the license to pry that comes with the job—and, perhaps, by the illusion of anonymity that working in strange places can produce. Call it a professional deformation. The fact remains that, given the choice between a vacation without a notebook and a revolution with one, most of us would pass on the yellow sundress or the cargo pants and buy a flak jacket. The advantage is that I can pack in a half hour for any work trip, as long as I have a daily supply of pens, a stack of my favorite interview pads—six by nine, lined, spiral on top—and a couple of clean black turtlenecks and jeans. But how do you pack for a vacation? Who would willingly exchange license and anonymity for the role of gawker in a sundress?

I did. For three weeks in January, I became a tourist. No notebooks, no Bic twelve-packs. No interviews at all—an exercise in self-restraint triggered by the news that years of frequent-flier miles, racked up in the pursuit of stories, were going to expire in February. After four days spent attempting communication with the “reward specialists” at a United phone bank near Mumbai, I managed to nail two round-trip reservations for Bangkok, which was as far as my miles would take us. That settled, the question became: What would I do for three weeks in Southeast Asia if I wasn’t working? What would my husband, an anthropologist between semesters with his own notebook (spiral on the left), do? If you are a responsible tourist, the answer is that you fly everywhere, and see everything. I called American Express. An hour later, I was downloading a five-page itinerary that put us at a total of ten plane trips and four countries in twenty days. I was comforted by the fact that, as the nice woman at American Express described it, I had booked a “once in a lifetime” trip.

We stayed two nights in Bangkok. Our plan was to ignore the city of gem scammers and sex tourists and see the “other Bangkok,” the preserve of nine generations of Chakri kings who have reigned in Thailand since the eighteenth century. The Thai were never colonized. But, imitation being the shrewdest form of flattery, they created their own Raj, as I discovered when an old boarding-school friend of my husband’s (a tiny Thai beauty last seen, in America, in the early eighties) surprised us at the arrival gate of Suvarnabhumi Airport. She was waiting comfortably in a wheelchair from which she promptly rose, and was accompanied by a silent Burmese servant referred to as “my assistant”—he carried her handbag—and an equally deferential Burmese driver. In thirty years, Noi (her childhood nickname) had morphed into a stout and commanding presence, dressed in billowing pantaloons and sporting a crew cut capped by a long black lock wound into a Buddha topknot and secured by a pin with a spectacular plume of black feathers. I imagined crowds parting as she led our motley procession out of the airport to a large white van. An hour later, we arrived at a cluster of stucco houses half hidden in a profusion of palms and flowering trees, and were greeted by leaping guard dogs, busy gardeners, and a flurry of young maids, carrying glasses of cold water on a tray. One of the maids relieved the assistant of Noi’s handbag. A second led us to a guesthouse, where a third waited to take our airplane clothes. None of them looked at me directly. When I returned their bows with a Thai hello, they were embarrassed and backed away. Were they meant to be invisible? I was a tourist lost in the Thai Raj, and wanted to go home.

We were driven to lunch instead—Thai curry and English rib roast at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, a vast green swath carved out of central Bangkok under a royal charter, granted in 1901, “for the purpose of improving the standard of horse breeding and various other field sports.” The next morning, we wandered past gilded stupas and formal gardens on our way to the Grand Palace and the National Museum, which were both closed, and, with a throng of other tourists, took off our shoes at the entrance to Phra Kaew, the royal wat—a wat is a monastery temple—for a glimpse of the Emerald Buddha, carved centuries ago from, depending on whom you ask, a huge chunk of precious jade or a piece of ordinary green jasper. (“Emerald” means “green” in Thai.) It is hard to tell, since no one except the king is allowed to touch it. The heat was infernal; I wished I had worn my sundress, but it was in the wash. Mostly, I missed my notebooks. Everything was a blur without them, and the tourist from Lyon with whom I’d struck up a conversation about French politics had disappeared, so I joined Noi on a shady bench while my husband prowled, and learned three interesting things: she had a passion for fast food, Sunday-afternoon dance contests, and, with an eye to enlightenment, meditation. In fact, she had recently spent the better part of a year in bed, meditating. I wasn’t surprised, having read that Prince Bodhidharma, the father of Zen Buddhism, once spent nine years meditating on a wall. I asked her how she had looked after herself, in bed. She said “the servants.” I asked her what enlightenment-seekers without servants did. She smiled and said, “Nothing is real.”

A day later, we were in Cambodia. In my other life, I would have stayed in Bangkok, indulging my new interest in Buddhists with personal handbag-bearers, but Angkor Wat was waiting, and so was Siem Reap and its night market (guidebook-recommended). Siem Reap is the gateway to Angkor Wat—the tourist boomtown of a country still recovering from the devastations of the Khmer Rouge—and the road from the airport was lined with hotels in various stages of hasty construction and dilapidation. We had been forewarned, and checked into a small hotel in town called the Angkor Village, off a quiet street a few minutes from the market. It turned out to be a beautiful, inside-outside sort of place, with wide-planked wooden walls and open walkways above pools of water, rippling over stones, and flowers cascading from every surface. The guests, gathered in the bar at the end of the afternoon, were staring into their drinks so intently that, for a moment, I wondered if they were all reporters, on the trail of a story that I was going to miss. But they were tourists, like me. We skipped the market, ordered a spicy Cambodian dinner, and sat till midnight under a starry sky. The tranquillity was irresistible. Five hours later, our phone rang with a wake-up call.

By the time we unglued our eyes, we were in the back of an old sedan, lurching toward the jungle in a caravan of trucks, buses, cars, mopeds, and makeshift taxis, or tuk-tuks—mopeds with open wagons tied behind them. Our guide was Sophal, a small, talkative man with a big smile and wistful eyes. He was born in Siem Reap in the early years of the Khmer Rouge, and was passionate on the subject of education, having spent the better part of his own studying under his bed, by flashlight, hiding from Pol Pot’s soldiers. He was lucky, he said. He was never caught. He had wanted to be a teacher. The next day, he told me, he was hoping to show us some new schools. I asked if he had children. He shook his head. He couldn’t afford to marry.

Two million tourists a year visit Angkor, and, at first, it appeared that most of them were there that morning, waiting with us to see the sun rise over Asia’s most famous ruin. Sunrise at Angkor Wat amounts to guidebook catechism. Never mind that the wat itself was still a smudge in the semi-darkness. I had never seen so many people taking pictures of a smudge. Some were perched on the steps and galleries of an abandoned stupa, facing east. I took a picture of those tourists, the first and last of my trip, because the stupa looked as if it were tilting under their enormous weight. Then I climbed up and joined the crowd. The sunrise was undeniably majestic, and so was the sheer expanse of ancient stone, stretching for half a mile, as it emerged in the light. And then it was over.

We crossed the temple moat by way of a rickety bridge and, to the music of unseen monks chanting in the jungle and the slow boom of temple gongs, began the long trek up to the labyrinth of rooms and galleries that compose that empty, enormous ruin. Sophal turned on his flashlight. (Was this his old, under-the-bed flashlight? I wanted to ask, and didn’t.) Its light was dim, and, once inside, we couldn’t see anything but our feet, caught in a pale beam. We stumbled out and took the long way back to the parking lot, circling through jungle paths, past squatting mendicants and little orchestras propped on blankets on the ground. Some of their signs said “mutilés de guerre”—wounded war survivors and mine victims. Many of them were missing legs. I wondered if they considered themselves lucky, too, like Sophal. Nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population died during the last four years of Khmer terror. The living hid, or were forced to serve it. I could imagine the dead more easily than I had ever imagined the survivors, but here they were, making music for tourists at Angkor Wat. The tourist in me stopped to listen. The reporter in me just stopped, confounded by the reality of so much trauma in the midst of the obfuscating magic of an ancient past. Surprisingly, the musicians were smiling as they played.

Two days later, we had trekked to seven temples, including Banteay Srei, the pink stone Hindu temple carved with dancing goddesses and known as the “lady temple”—the one from which André Malraux stole the statues, though not, alas, the one from which Angelina Jolie emerged, guns blazing, as the tomb raider Lara Croft. (Angkor Wat, like most of the region’s oldest heritage sites, began as a Hindu temple.) We had explored the countryside, visited stilt villages on the edge of abandoned farms, and climbed into a rotting boat to see the “floating villages” of Tonle Sap Lake, a picturesque euphemism for the poorest villages of them all. Thousands of Vietnamese refugees live on the lake, in raft houses, floating in and out with the seasons, selling fish, or tickets to the crocodile “farms” lashed to their rafts, or snacks and sodas and tourist baskets. I saw a floating school, and wondered, Where do the children play? I saw a thirsty girl, no more than four or five, speeding alone in a tiny long-tailed boat. She was leaning over the side, scooping water into her mouth with her hands. I worried about what was in that water, and where her parents were. I wanted to ask them where their parents came from. Were they dissident tribal people—Montagnards who had fought alongside the Americans against the Vietcong and, after the Americans lost, fled? Did they dream of home? There was no time for questions. We flew to Hanoi, as planned.

There are maybe five traffic lights in Hanoi. The best way to cross the street is with your eyes closed, because six and a half million people live there, and they all have mopeds, most of which will be speeding toward you, wherever you are, if you start to look. The city throbs. Students from the West love it; it’s the Prague of their generation. They come for the clubs and for the edgy, entrepreneurial energy of the place, buy their own mopeds, and add to the crush. Unless you visit the Ho Chi Minh memorial complex—park, house, mausoleum with embalmed corpse—it’s hard to believe that Hanoi had once been command central to a Communist revolution that kept the country at war with the West for thirty years, and won. In today’s Hanoi, going native means that you’re a twenty-year-old from America or Australia and can hone the same sort of peripheral biker’s vision that the locals have. It keeps you from getting hit, even when the mopeds are stacked with bolts of fabric or produce or pots of flowers, or even miniature orange trees, dripping fruit and poking out in every direction. There were plenty of orange trees in evidence when I crossed my first Hanoi street. (“Go straight. Don’t look!” my husband shouted.) The run-up to Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year, had just begun, and Tet is when everybody buys an orange tree, for prosperity.

We were now safe in the old market district of the city, a grid of small, teeming streets, lined with shops and venders. It was a sunny day. People were sitting on sidewalks, cooking and eating—in Southeast Asia, you eat when the urge hits you—while tourists like me, out shopping for silk, negotiated their way around them. I followed the other tourists, and found a perfect robe for my daughter: cherry red, raw silk, kimono sleeves. A steal. On the next corner, I stopped to help a woman with cartons of pots and pans tumbling off her moped fenders. We chatted for a minute, laughing. Neither of us understood a word of what the other said, but it felt good, almost as if I were out on an interview.

But not quite. Tourists do not go shopping with interpreters, so I couldn’t ask her the questions that had been nagging at me since I first stepped out of the French colonial comforts—restored by Sofitel—of the Hotel Metropole, where everyone said “Bonjour” and I could have a conversation: What, exactly, is a people’s republic, circa 2012? What does the word “Communist” mean when all the Communists you see seem so optimistically—and, more to the point, privately—involved in getting rich. How does the city of parks and colonial mansions and crowded markets and millions of tall, improbably narrow, painted houses—the city that tourists see first—get on with the silent official city that lets them know that the Party is omnipresent, that there is virtually no freedom of the press, no right to organize or protest, no legal opposition. (“The China model,” foreign investors call it.) Life in Hanoi is a tradeoff—one freedom for another.

We went to the ethnographic museum, and found socialist-folklore dioramas of the country’s long-suffering tribes. I liked the old bicycle sprouting bundles of bamboo fishing baskets, because it had once belonged to a Red River Delta peddler named Pham Dang Uy, and you could see his photograph on the wall, but the rest was lifeless. We walked to a grim state bookstore around the corner from a street of designer boutiques, and climbed to the third floor to look at the foreign books. I spotted a row of Lonely Planets and asked a French-speaking student working there for the volume on Vietnam. She shook her head—not for sale—and said dryly, “Apparently, it contained some errors.” It occurred to me then that I was getting dangerously distracted by the political undersong in a city that I had found delightful—and left the next morning, for Laos, longing to return.

Luang Prabang is an ancient Laotian pilgrimage town—three long streets, thirty-two monastery temples, and more than a thousand monks in residence—set on a verdant triangle where the Mekong and the Nam Khan Rivers cross. In 1995, the town was named a UNESCO World Heritage destination (meaning definitely worth a visit) and its wats were restored. Today, it is the kind of place where foreigners come and stay, and eventually get proprietary and protective—and complain about newcomers spoiling the “authenticity.” Our host at the Apsara Hotel was an English expat. The reigning Laotian chef was French. And the man who sold me a pair of bone salad servers was Australian. But most of the tourists were in fact Asian. We met three big Chinese families—parents, children, and children’s friends—who pulled up in a couple of rented vans while we were eating lunch at the Apsara’s riverside restaurant. They ordered everything on the menu, and then seconds. “Hungry,” one of the mothers told me, laughing. They had driven for five days to celebrate the Tet holidays in Luang Prabang. They were going to taste everything and see everything, like us.

After a few days, I was ready to stay in Luang Prabang, too. We woke early and—with an American friend who was volunteering with a women’s health-and-education project in Vientiane, and had flown up with us from the capital—watched the sunrise procession of monks and novices, who emerged from their monasteries, barefoot, to cross the city, collecting food from the pilgrims and townspeople waiting with bowls and baskets of rice and fruit. In their saffron robes, they made a ribbon of color, weaving through the streets. No one spoke to the monks. None of the monks said thank you. The exchange was solemn. Buddhists call it “earning merit,” because they give food in order to speed their path through the next world. We spent our days walking. We visited every temple, bought presents, and, at the end of each afternoon, I sat by the river, reading borrowed thrillers whose hero-sleuth was an elderly Laotian surgeon with a secret library of French classics, a belief in spirits, and a job that he had been ordered out of retirement to take, as the country’s coroner. Monks, thrillers, and the Mekong. I felt an idyll coming on. It was time to leave.

In Chiang Mai, Thailand’s northern capital, I began to suspect that reporters can never have the adventure of being real tourists: a little lost, knowing nobody, entirely on their own. Reporters meet people, and some of those people become friends and, eventually, turn up in your life someplace else. Someplace where they’re in charge of the conversation. Naomi Duguid, the Toronto food scholar and cookbook writer, whom I’d met (and profiled) five years earlier, keeps a little apartment in a funky Chiang Mai neighborhood where she offers a course in Thai and Shan home cooking for a week each February. We caught up with her there, a couple of days ahead of seven foreign foodies. I said, “We’re in tourist mode. Show us everything.” And she did. We prowled the streets, discovering beautiful old wooden houses tucked between stucco apartment blocks. We crossed the bridges of the Ping River in bumpy tuk-tuks. We peered into storefronts advertising a dozen varieties of exotic massage—the Thai are addicted to massage, and you can get one on any street—and sat in courtyard cafés where the regulars picked up their teacups and followed the sun from table to table. We sampled steaming street soups and rested under the shade trees in the public garden of a royal wat in the old, walled center of the city. We got lost in the cluttered aisles of a Chiang Mai “history” museum, assembled, with filial abandon, by the elderly son of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Scottish merchant who had married and settled there—think faded photographs, cracked pitchers, dusty bell jars, old Victrolas, and scraps of fabric. In an unmarked shop on an unnamed street, we tried on Akha jackets and sorted through bolts of homespun and antique Burmese basket backpacks. We ate spicy curries and cooled our throats with a lot of Thai beer. We met a Belgian professor who spent his evenings playing guitar in a local jazz club, and an old Hmong woman selling Burmese bone amulets at the Friday tribal market.

Chiang Mai’s Friday market may be the most fascinating, not to mention the tastiest, market in Southeast Asia, and by then I had visited eight. Laos is just over the mountains to the east, and Myanmar just over the mountains to the west, and, as anyone in the drug trade could tell you, those borders are so porous as to be nonexistent. I bought a bone amulet for my grandson; it was carved with the image of a Chinese demigod who, according to the old Hmong woman, would shepherd him through the rigors of first grade, in Brooklyn, next September. We ate deep-fried Burmese doughnuts and skewers of beef and pork, grilled with Laotian spices, and sampled the crackling sold by Karens from northern Thailand. We found three seats at a long communal table, dipped our fingers into platters of fermented cucumbers and shoots, and sprinkled them into steaming bowls of Hmong soup. For a moment, I peered into my spoon, wondering how many fingers had already dipped into those cucumbers and, more precisely, whose fingers they were—but not for long.

We flew to Bangkok to begin the long trip home and checked into the Peninsula for a last-night splurge. We sank into the bubbly depths of a porcelain tub, snacked on the complimentary chocolate-chip cookies, and put on our city clothes. Then we climbed the gangplank to the hotel ferry and crossed the Chao Phraya to go antiquing. We returned with a glazed ceramic Bodhidharma, which was either an early-nineteenth-century Chinese treasure or made yesterday in one of Thailand’s thriving fake factories. To celebrate (or weep), we ate that night at the hotel’s Chinese restaurant, the first I had seen in Thailand. I eavesdropped on the people at the next table—a middle-aged businessman from California and two young Thai women carrying huge new Hermès purses. The women studied the menu, admired their handbags, and chattered comfortably to each other while the businessman tried, gamely, to divert them with stories about his star-studded Los Angeles life. From time to time, they would look up from their plates and nod at him politely—making the best of a long day’s night in the Bangkok sex trade. It occurred to me that they were hungry. I felt for them all. Then I thought about how our maiden trip as tourists had begun with a pocketbook and was about to end with two. Was there a message in that? Or perhaps a piece? I was a reporter at odds. Why hadn’t I brought a pad? ♦

Jane Kramer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1964 and has written the Letter from Europe since 1981.